Quotes About Conflict

If you have a fight with yourself, who can win?

Too often we forget that "discipline" really means "to teach"—not "to punish." A disciple is a student, not a recipient of behavioral consequences. When we teach mindsight, we take moments of conflict and transform them into opportunities for learning, skill building, and brain development.

Recent studies have found that the best predictor for good sibling relationships later in life is how much fun the kids have together when they're young. The rate of conflict can even be high, as long as there's plenty of fun to balance it out. The real danger comes when the siblings just ignore each other. There may be less tension to deal with, but that's also a recipe for a cold and distant relationship as adults.

You can discipline in a way that's high on relationship, high on respect, and low on drama and conflict—and

That's a direct lesson every parent should consider quite deeply: do we want to teach our kids that the way to resolve a conflict is to inflict physical pain, particularly on someone who is defenseless and cannot fight back?

When we teach mindsight, we take moments of conflict and transform them into opportunities for learning, skill building, and brain development

When we avoid bringing extra chaos and drama to disciplinary situations—in other words, when we combine clear and consistent limits with loving empathy—everyone wins.

Another problem with spanking is that it teaches the child that the parent has no effective strategy short of inflicting bodily pain. That's a direct lesson every parent should consider quite deeply: do we want to teach our kids that the way to resolve a conflict is to inflict physical pain, particularly on someone who is defenseless and cannot fight back?

do we want to teach our kids that the way to resolve a conflict is to inflict physical pain, particularly on someone who is defenseless and cannot fight back?

My advice to students when I taught negotiations was that if you think the other side has made an outrageous proposal, you should not come back with an equally outrageous counteroffer, creating a gap that will be difficult to bridge in further negotiations. Instead you should make a scene, storm out or threaten to do so, and make it clear—to yourself as well as to the other side—that you will not continue the negotiation with that number on the table.

Most organizations prefer consensus and harmony over dissent and conflict. The procedures in place often seem expressly designed to minimize the frequency of exposure to actual disagreements and, when such disagreements happen, to explain them away.

frequency of lovemaking minus frequency of quarrels

Conflict between an automatic reaction and an intention to control it is common in our lives.

The classic experiment I describe next shows that people will not draw from base-rate information an inference that conflicts with other beliefs. It also supports the uncomfortable conclusion that teaching psychology is mostly a waste of time.

Since I was an atheist for many years and came to believe in God through my studies in science, it frustrated me to see students and parents who viewed faith and science as enemies.

You would think that with ten super-famous people in one movie, it's gonna be ten times more popular or viewed, but on some level, they can cancel each other out.

The promise of any artwork is that it can hold us - viewer and maker - in a conflicted or contestable space, without real-world injury or loss.

The Iraq War marked the beginning of the end of network news coverage. Viewers saw the juxtaposition of the embedded correspondents reporting the war as it was actually unfolding and the jaundiced, biased, negative coverage of these same events in the network newsrooms.

Viewing Israelis and Palestinians from a psychological perspective, they would both be seen as victims of abuse; that is how they both understandably feel, and it's how they both understandably behave. The Jewish psyche is in victimized reaction to the Holocaust, and the Palestinian psyche is in victimized reaction to the Israelis.

The mainland Chinese tend to take a Chinese mainland point of view on controversial issues, and the Taiwanese take another the Taiwanese viewpoint.

There will certainly be times when Merkel and I will have opposing viewpoints. Just the fact that government work adheres to a different set of prerogatives than a party does makes conflicts unavoidable.

I have a very successful father-in-law and family with very different political views.

Obviously, Ian Paisley and I were regarded as very bitter opponents. When we decided in March 2007 to govern together, both of us understood that we weren't going to change our views but that we had to work with one another if we were to end the conflict and move forward.

What was the American Revolution? The people who joined to carry it out had different views of what they had done.